A Woman in the Polar Night

Product Information

I do think that it is important to mention that there is sexism and hunting for food and fur involved. Ritter talks about this in a way that aligns with the time it is written. She is explaining her lived experiences when writing this and sexism is not the focal point of this book. Hunting is used for survival and combatting a limited food supply in an area with limited access to buying goods and services and poor land for growing – 4 stars.

veeta terve aasta, sh polaaröö JA talv (selgub, et need ei kattugi) Teravmägedel mingis imetillukeses onnis koos kahe mehega, süüa ainult hülgeliha ja hahamune, loota üle kõige sellele, et saaks vahelduseks jääkaruliha, lõbustada end põhiliselt õmblemise, söögitegemise ja koristamisega? ei iial, aga samas tundub, et Christiane'il oli suurepärane aasta :)The book was written ninety years ago by a woman who decided to spend a winter in the remote north with her husband, who apparently had been living there for some time without her. Not until she's underway does she learn that another man will be living with them. The human relations among the few people in the area (the closest neighbor is sixty miles away by non-motorized means) are intriguing, and she also spends a lot of time alone and writes about it well. My partner and I have spent weeks looking at cruises to Svalbard. It’s not such an unusual choice any more. We’re drawn to the landscape, the wildlife, the excitement of the experience. We’ve decided not to go because it seems wrong. I’m not saying it’s wrong for everyone but it feels wrong for us. Looking at the convoys of cruise ships rounding Cape Horn and exploring the Alaskan fjords, we don’t feel we want to contribute to the commercialisation of once wild places and would rather leave the wildlife and wild places in peace. I’ll leave the last words to Ritter. Do we really need the force of contrast to live intensively? It must be that. For a gentle song would not shake us if we had never heard a loud one." Published in 1938, ‘A Woman in the Polar Night’ by Christiane Ritter based on the author’s experiences in the remote Arctic island of Spitsbergen is considered a cult classic with the original German book translated into over seven languages, never going out of print over the years. The author is no self proclaimed or experienced explorer and that makes this book all the more interesting. There is no insight given to readers as to what makes her take up her husband’s offer of joining him for a year in the vast desolation except a vague fascination about the beauty of the wilderness that her husband writes to her about.

One of the first things her husband does when she gets there is to leave her alone for 12 days while he goes hunting with his male friend who also lives with them. A snow storm came up, and she spent those days shoveling snow just to be able to get in and out of her hut and to prevent being buried. Are we having fun yet? Christiane Ritter, an Austrian artist, lived with her husband, a hunter in Spitsbergen, for a year. Hunters lived solitary and dangerous lives but thrived on the challenge. Christiane’s husband, Hermann, invited her to join him and another hunter because they wanted a ‘housewife’. Over the winter, she would be left on her own while they went hunting. No electricity, no facilities, no running water, nothing but a tiny stove to heat the tiny hut which was barely a bunk’s length wide and which would mostly be completely immersed in snow. This would be an adventure in contemporary, tech-driven times but this was 1934. Most of the book was about their surviving the long year, and then her writing about the beauty of the place. I wish that I could see it for maybe a week. The writing is quite restrained in places (e.g. when it comes to detailing personal information or relationships), but Ritter's descriptions of her surroundings are captivating. Landscape, climate, and nature - and how they change throughout the year - are all depicted in an almost painterly style: Christiane Ritter was neither an explorer nor a luminary. Instead, she was a well-to-do Austrian hausfrau who, prior to her year in Spitsbergen, had never strayed far from her comfortable surroundings. Yet perhaps because she had no interest in an Arctic Grail, whether the Pole, the Northwest Passage, or just an Unknown Land, she could appreciate the Arctic in ways that the aforementioned luminaries, wrapped in their Grail-oriented blinders, could not. And in appreciating the Arctic, indeed thriving in it, she gave the lie to the notion that women do not belong at the ends of the earth.What beautiful writing with a great story, except sometimes she writes about trapping animals for the fur trade, which I am against. Still, she doesn't go into any detail, so if you have the mind to, you can let it go over your head like I had to do. This rediscovered classic memoir tells the incredible tale of a woman defying society’s expectations to find freedom and peace in the adventure of a lifetime. And her phrases hang like paintings in her book. For example, this passage about the morning twilight: “The whole sky is deep lilac, lightening into a tender cobalt blue at the horizon, over the sea of ice. From the east a pale-yellow brightness spreads, and the frozen sea, reflecting the heavenly colours, shines like an immense opal.” It is definitely the right time to read this book as the weather is cold, and the nights are long. While reading it, I was thankful for all the amenities we have; especially the heating system and, access to clean water. But it also made me feel like an anomaly; disconnected from nature and missing all the essential things one has to witness.

mulle nii kohutavalt meeldib, kui mõni inimene reisib kohta, kuhu (või asjaoludel, millistel) mina iial ei reisiks, ja siis suudab sellest kirjutada raamatu, mis peaaegu et paneb mu ümber mõtlema. väidetavalt on raamat olnud pidevalt trükis alates 1934. aastast, kui ta ilmus, ja tõesti on tegu kuidagi ajatu teosega - võibolla poleks samas kohas elades praegu eriti midagi teisiti (kuigi vajalikud vitamiinid vast võetaks purgiga kaasa, selmet jääkaru peale lootma jääda). kuigi kas seda jääd kliimamuutuste järel enam nii palju on, seda ma ei tea. aga vast külm ja valgus (või selle puudumine polaaröö ajal) ja tähed ja sellised asjad on ikka samasugused. They would have been only slightly less appalled to learn that the only other women who'd spent time in Spitsbergen all had some sort of previous experience in the North. Ich bin so froh, es als Hörbuch genossen zu haben, denn beim Lesen hätte ich bestimmt am Schreibstil zu knabbern gehabt. So konnte ich mich einfach fallen lassen und mit der Protagonistin die Polarnacht durchleben und staunen. Ich weiß nicht, woher diese Faszination für Bücher, die im ewigen Eis spielen rührt, aber ich bin jedesmal wieder hin und weg.

Need Help?

Everything breathes the same serenity. It is as though a current of the most holy and perfect peace were streaming through all the landscape. ....this stupendous and glorious world. Sie berichtet vom dortigen Alltag, den Aufgaben und ihren Erfahrungen. Besonders schön und persönlich fand ich, dass ihrem Buch acht ihrer Aquarelle und 25 ihrer Federzeichnungen hinzugefügt wurden, die das Buch abrunden und sehr bereichert haben- immerhin war Ritter Künstlerin. So dürfen wir als LeserInnen (abseits des Geschriebenen) erfahren, wie sie ihre Zeit dort wahrgenommen hat.

Layout - so on top of being bored to tears with the subject, I actually didn't understand a lot of her writing. Most of the time I had no idea where she even was, she referred to every stopping point as 'the hut' which had me totally lost - taking me yet further out of the story. And I felt she almost wanted her writing to be so 'beautiful' that she never actually got to the point, it was just descriptive words. I’m not lost for words. I can think of a hundred words to describe how I feel about this book but none of them is adequate. Why have I been so shaken by the peacefulness of nature? Because it was preceded by the titanic storm? Do we really need the force of contrast to live intensively? It must be that. For a gentle song would not shake us if we had never heard a loud one." In 1934, at age 36, Christiane Ritter, an Austrian painter and housewife, agrees to join her trapper husband in Spitsbergen (Svalbard), Norway for one year. This area is solitude and remoteness like no other place on the planet. “Chrissie” has no survival training and no real travel experience. A Woman In The Polar Night is a collection of her poetic reflections on that year - the days, weeks and months filled with beauty, danger and courage, howling winds and crashing ice floes, arctic ptarmigan and polar foxes, northern light and profound darkness. I highly recommend this German classic to anyone who enjoys reading detailed descriptions of the natural world and our tiny place within it. Ritter lived to be 103 years old, so maybe a year immersed in an Arctic landscape with nothing but nature for companionship is worth consideration after all. What would cause a woman to want to go live in the Artic for a year? The young woman in this story is married to a man that is a hunter/trapper who takes expeditions to the Artic and lives in a hut on the small island of Spitsbergen. He asks her to come live with him, and that is all it took for her to leave their young child. She takes off on a boat with a mirror, a feather bed, books, camel hair clothing, spoons, and herbs. Speaking of herbs, you have to find some way to spice up the meals that they end up eating. The feather bed and books were a good idea too, but everything in the hut got damp, very damp. But I once spent the night in a jungle with a wet wool blanket, and it kept me warm, so maybe feather beds are like that, still warm when damp.

Observations

The book has never been out of print in Germany, and someday I'd like to try a reread in the original German. 4.5 stars. She agrees, leaving her small daughter with family in Germany and ignoring pleas about this being a "hairbrain" scheme. She arrives in August and she does indeed live for a year with her husband and, as an added bonus, his hunting partner, Karl, a Norwegian. I wondered how she felt when she found, with no warning, that she would be living in a 10x10 hut with not just her husband but a strange man! Her writing is both matter of fact and lyrical, with never a mention of complaint. I think she survived through her good humor and through discovery - the "strange illumination of one's own self" and of seeing the world anew. Ritter doesn’t only vividly describe how she adapts and changes from a housewife into a hardened, clever Artic hunter, but also the terrifying power and beauty of the polar landscape. On dark frozen days, the land becomes an intoxicating lunar landscape, the frozen sea can shine like an immense opal, and a furious snowstorm feels terrifying yet exhilarating, shaking humanity to its core. We know Christiane Ritter returned to Austria with a heightened sense of equanimity. When the family’s estate burned to the ground, her daughter said, she took it in stride, no mourning. She died in 2000 at the age of 103.